Dave Noderer's Blog

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085698&pageNumber=1

 

I was honored to be able to attend the first meeting of the Bahams .net (www.bahanet.org) user group in Nassau last week.

Kyle Baly (http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/) organized the meeting held at a local comany IPBS.

Fairly small group but that is ok! None of them knew what to expect and surprisingly none of them were there due to a direct contact with Kyle but because someone told them about it.

After getting them warmed up to what was possible in learning, business networking and socializing, they all left very enthused and ready for the next meeting which as already been scheduled.

It does not seem that .net is quite as far along on the island as it is here in the states but maybe this is a message to me that we should address basic .net topics at our user group meetings in Florida. We have tried a few times but it has not continued. This was also brought up to me when someone who is fairly new to .net happened to go to the www.fladotnet.com webstie and looked at our first video (see link at bottom of right column) where Jason Beres was talking about basic clr and framework concepts (this was in the fall of 2001).

Another interesting thing was that there really is no techincal netowking to speak of in the bahams. Everyone who grew up there attended "COB", College of the Bahamass (http://www.cob.edu.bs/) but apparently students don't have access to free Microsoft software there and there is no continuing contact among the alumni.

So, even if there are qualified people on the island to do technical work (.net ,rpg, php, etc...) the tendancy is to go elsehwere, the United States or Canada for example.

People did not know about DotNetNuke, Robotics Studio and a number of other appealing dot net based projects and technologies they  might be using.

It will be interesting to watch how this develops. The next meet scheduled for May 28th will cover basics of creating an asp.net website.

Thanks Kyle!!

 

 

This year, US Teched will be held in Orlando starting on June 2^nd with the developer week and continuing the following week for IT Pros…

 

So it happens that the Orange County Convention Center is available and as many of you already know, the Florida people are putting together a number of things that include SQL, DotNet University, DotNetNuke, etc.. AND a Florida Code Camp which Shervin and I are heading up.

 

This is the first “tweener” weekend and may end up being a major event in and of itself. The will be lots of things going on before, during and after so even if you are not attending teched, a couple of nights in Orlando will be worth it!

Current schedule for code camp rooms: http://www.fladotnet.com/FloridaCodeCamp_2008_20080408.mht
More info on tweener weekend: www.tweenerweekend.com
Tweener weekend flyer: http://www.fladotnet.com/downloads/Inbetweenv04.pdf

 

Links to more information will be posted on the FlaDotNet.com site: http://www.fladotnet.com

 

The new site will be at: www.theguyfromboston.net

About 1 1/2 years ago I emailed a request to one of my senator's in Florida, Bill Nelson - D, for a pass to  watch a shuttle launch. I got a fairly quick response, they had received the request but that the next flight was already booked. I would be on the wait list...

Fast forward to Feb 2008 and I got a call to see if I was interested in the Mar 11 (planned) STS-123 launch... Yeah!!

The launch is scheduled at 2:30 am which may be why I bubbled to the top of the list.

I got a written inviation from NASA and eventually detailed information on what to do.

This invitation is for the Banana Creek VIP Viewing area, where the countdown clock is, near the launch center and 3.3 miles from the launch pad.

One bad thing is I cannot take my laptop there so no real time reporting!

Report:

It was really great, this veiwing area is adjacent to the Saturn V visitors center with bleachers for  a couple hundred.

There is a grassy area in front of the bleachers and that is where I sat/stood on the grass next to the 3' high fence. You could see the Vehicle Assembly Building to the right and the pad straight ahead. The launch was awesome, the only thing wrong was that there was a fairly low cloud ceiling, we figured about 10000 ft so the shuttle promptly dissapeared after laucnh.

This area is where the astronaut families watch from too (i'm 90% sure on this point) but they had a section of bleachers roped off at one end.

The visitors center was open for business and there were a number of conssessions.

I met a lot of really great people including a college engineering professor from New Orleans and his wife and college age son. As we were all professional nerds, the time went by fast talking about the shuttle, amps, robots and software. It turns out the son had done a summer internship a Michoud and worked on the pesky Engine Cutoff Sensors.

A big thanks to my Senator, Bill Nelson for making the trip possible!!

Photos: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!346/

The camera could just not deal with the initial launch brightness but there is a great picture of the plume after the shuttle has gone through the clouds.

In one of the most inventive moves I've ever witnessed, they had an annoucment before the launch that the solid rocket exhaust plume filled with Hydrocloric Acid would take 25 min to reach the viewing area so everyone should move quickly to the busses!

 

It's all over, what a rush!

Final stats...

795 registered, over 600 showed up, 50 speakers gave 71 sessions over 12 parallel tracks.

We drank 1100 waters, 500 sodas, over 700 cups of coffee, ate 170 pizzas and used 300 pounds of ice.

Feedback can be viewed at: http://www.codecampevals.com/speakers/SpeakerEvals.aspx?CodeCampID=17

Some photos at: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!316/

Russ & Alex Photos:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rfustino/archive/2008/02/11/photos-from-the-code-camp-in-south-florida-2-2-2008.aspx

Speaker links as I get them: http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

Thanks to all the sponsors for making this great event happen!

No code camp would be possible without all the great speakers, some local and many who traveled to on their own with no monetary help from us. The entire developer community is grateful to each one!

I'd like to point out the other volunteers who helped make it all look easy! Many of them were speakers as well but I want to make sure they get the credit they deserve.

Ed Hill - Devry University Professor organized the venue, provided student volunteers, acted as "Intro to .NET" track chair, made multiple runs to Costco, received the material and was on the run  all day Saturday during the event.

Scott Katarincic - created web administration pages  without which we would have been poking in the datbase and the sesssion / speaker entries could not have been distributed.

Charles Curtis - Handled the sponsor images and displays, this was a big help!

DeVry Student Volunteers.. I don't have a list of  names but without them and the help of Bob O'Connell (another Devry professor) we would have had to recruit a lot more volunteers for the day of the event. They did a great job, just point them in the right direction and they took off with the task at hand.

Alex Funkhouser - In  charge of the T-shirts and t-shirt graphics plus organization of the commons for the sponsors and donated Mike Wasserman.

Mike Wasserman - Mike did all the legwork for organizing the speaker reception on Firday night and the post party at JP Mulligans on Saturday night. Both came off smoothly, people had plenty to eat and drink and did not go over the budget.

Jonas Stawski (Spanish), Larry  Port (Agile), Jeff Barnes (Architecture) and Bill Reiss (Pre-Mix 08/Silverlight) stand out as excellent track chairs that spent considerable time thnking about and organizing their respective tracks.

I have to mention John Dunagan aka "ICE MAN" who for the second year in a row drove from Naples to deliver 300 pounds of ice... ok, he just poped over to public but it was a big help!

Mai Nguyen was our session monitor and kept a count of each session. Thanks!

Morgan Baker helped organize the un-organized speaker sessions with a spreadsheet that got us launched into the actual scheduling of sessions.

Shevin Shakibi as always provided great ideas and moral support and was the SQL/BI track chair.

Jose  Luis Manners was a Spanish co-chair  but was in the middle of a number of work issues and ended up being out of town during code camp.

Joe Healy as always was a great support but i think he enjoyed sitting back and watching it happen without a lot of his help. And this year he was very sick and just barely made it to code camp on Saturday! He helped locate and motivate a number of the speakers  and as always is a valued part of the team!

Next year's code camp has been set for  2/8/2009.

 

FREE - 4th Annual South Florida Code Camp - Register Now - Spaces are going fast!

To attend this free, all day .NET Developer mini-conference register at: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122048 ! The Code Camp will be held on Saturday 2/2/2008 and include breakfast, lunch, giveaways, valuable raffle items and of course lots of great content!

The sessions are now listed on the agenda page. A big thanks to all the speakers that have stepped forward and volunteered to come speak at their own expense. We have already scheduled 70 of 72 sessions. There will be something for everyone... from the person who is new to .net to advanced architecture and software process sessions. For the second year we will have an all Spanish track. Dedicated tracks include "Into to .NET", "Silverlight" and "Agile / CI". Sessions include Ajax, MVC, Visual Studio 2008, Powershell, Windows Workflow and .NET reflection.

Find more information at http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com . We have many sessions lined up. The track chairs will get them organized and on the website agenda over the next couple of weeks.

It was amazing to watch the The Guy From Boston on the Tonight show last nigh. Bobbi and I struggled to stay awake but it was worth it!

You can watch the video at: http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes.shtml

Go to the Jan 17th (2008) episode and the Joe Ligotti Chapter.

 

For Thursday 1/17/2008

Update: "The Guy From Boston" on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno has been confirmed for Tuesday, Jan 15th..

Wow!! Way to go Joey!

Keep up with the guy's video rants every Wednesday at: http://www.theyguyfromboston.com

 

WOW!! That was fun!

The room was packed with 50 people and their machines loading Visual Studio 2008 while Joe Healy (www.devfish.net) talked about various Visual Studio Features.

People started arriving at 5PM with Ed Hil from DeVry checking identiies and dna samples. Up to 6:30 PM only the 1st 50 on the list who showed up with a machine got a copy. During this time we kept a list of people as they arrived and the order they arrived in. At 6:30 we opened it up and had just enough copies for everyone!

As each person finished, we took their picture with their completed install screen which Joe will post on his website.

But... this was no ordinary presentation.. the room was "buzzing" all night as people are talking about the installs and other topics too. A few people had problems and were awared the mechanical "bug" by Joe as a prize but most were able to finish. One person had a big server box and 24" monitor! Another had an older system which unfortunately did not have a DVS player.

A few of the DVD's were bad but everyone shared and more importantly got the code for the boxed version.

Everyone got a Visual Studio 2008 T-shirt and thanks to Sherlock Technologies (www.sherstaff.com) and Mike Wasserman, we had pizza and soda.

A big big thanks to Joe Healy, our Microsoft Developer Evangalist for making this possible... Hey now we know how to fill the room each month, give everyone $600 of free software!

 See photos through Joe Healy's blog: http://www.devfish.net/FullBlogItemView.aspx?BlogId=473

Sams - ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33007-0 by Adam Nathan

This is a nice book in a number of ways... fairly short, limited scope, nice color pictures and full of great tips that could save you some time.

Adam covers the basics of Silverlight 1.0 which is pretty straight forward and will give you a good handle on what it does and does not do. Even though Silverlight 2.0+ is of more interest to most of us, this is a great way to start!

A bulk of the book is about basic XAML as implemented in Silverlight 1.0. If you are not familiar with WPF, this is a good tutorial on both drawing and events. If you are familiar with WPF in depth, a review of this material will show you where Silverlight is different.

An example of the tips, there are a lot of them in shaded boxes throughout the booik, are a pair of warnings.on pages 28 and 29 showing some of the quirks of the syntax where in the Silverlight.CreateObject. In particular the isWindowless must be specified true/false as a string "true" where as inplaceInstallPrompt must not be specified as a string.. true to work.

He also spends a lot of space on handling events, bubbling of events and some of the more suble "features". Although it makes perfect sense, the silverlight control must have focus to receive keystrokes. Only the root silverlight control can receive the gotfocus and lostfocus events.

Anyway a very nice book with lots of examples.

Now give me the CLR and some controls in Silverlight 2.0 and I'll be a happy camper!

I've been using regular expressions to validate email for quite a while. Recently I ran across a case where the email started with a number like 4thisisatest@computerways.com which was rejected.

Investigating some more I found a better expression at:

http://www.breakingpar.com/bkp/home.nsf/0/87256B280015193F87256C40004CC8C6

The expression i'm using now is:

(([^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@\"]+(\.[^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@\"]+)*)|(\".+\"))@((\[(2([0-4]\d|5[0-5])|1?\d{1,2})(\.(2([0-4]\d|5[0-5])|1?\d{1,2})){3} \])|(([a-zA-Z\-0-9]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,}))

Which works for the case above...

Although there are online and even free tools for regex testing, I still use regex buddy: www.regexbuddy.com which does cost but is very useful to me.

 

I've just finished reading asp.net Ajax in action by Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol and Rama Krishna Vavilala. ISBN-10: 1933988142

My philosophy about javascript can be summed up in one word "yuk!" I keep hoping that the need to learn javascript will pass as the tools catch up and extend the .net dev environment to the browser client. This is happening with much better tools for debugging and deploying javascript in vs 2008. Still i'm a curious person and am embarrased to admit how little javascript I know and use.

One thing this book gave me was a very good education on javascript and the very powerful engine built into all browsers and i'm walking away with a much better apprciation for what is there and how to use it. After reading the javascript chapter i'll no longer hesitate to use javascript where required.

On the AJAX front the book does a great job of explaining what the simple sever side Microsoft tools will and won't do and explains the events on the browser side in great detail. This is further expanded to describe the interaction with server side events. This all greatly expanded my knowledge of the page life cycle at the browser end.

All of the discussions are with detailed step by step examples in code which i liked a lot.

Great job guys!

2007-11-17 - Added organization, Lorins unconference website software and a few other update

A week or two ago a few guys wanting to get some ideas about running code camps. It has taken on a life of it's own but here are some notes I made based on running code camps in South Florida. I'll edit and add to this as the discussion progresses.

 

Organization

• Very important not to try and do it all  yourself, get others involved.
• Planning is key
• Start at least a few months out, lining up venue, sponsors
• Pay attention to basics. Venue, signage, food, directions.

 

Venue

• Free is good!
• Devry universities around the country seem to be open to dev events for no charge.
• In Florida community colleges charge some fees
• Best if you can have one large room or auditorium to accommodate everyone and then a bunch of classrooms.
• Don’t forget plenty of signage the day of the event.

 

Speakers

• Local / new speakers (chance to grow the community)
• MVP / RD
• MS DE’s can help a lot!
• We still use a word doc signup

 

Promotion

• Pull in all local user groups
• Promote to your members
• MSDN Flash
• Blogs

 

Sponsors

• Anti-manifesto but I claim there has never been a code camp without sponsors (Microsoft is a sponsor too!)
• The cheaper you can do the event, the less you have to worry about this.
• Recruiters, training companies,  hosting companies and some component vendors will supply money.
• Don't need a full schedule, just a date to get going. All sponsors want to know an approximate attendance.
• We don't (no code camp I'm aware of) share the registration list with sponsors.

 

Volunteers

• User group members
• We get students from the university where we have the event
• Many times spouses are willing to put in a Saturday

 

Food

• Pizza is the easiest (3-4 people per pizza)
• No food is an option but not normal
• Easy on breakfast, not everyone will show up at 8am

 

Swag

• Microsoft (we use as a last resort)
• Recruiters
• Component vendors (Infragistics, ComponentONe, Nevron, Ideablade)
• Magazines (asp.net pro, code, msdn)
• Publishers (apress, wrox, wiley, sams, etc)
• Some will give money all will give product.
• Local companies (training, consulting, large corp)

 

Website

• We have a beat up site passing from group to group if anyone is interested
• Microsoft group events for registration is enough if you don’t have a web site: https://www.microsoftgroupevents.com/groups/default.aspx
• Lorin Thwaits has published their code camp website on codeplex. It has a bunch of really great / advanced features and may become the standard we all use! http://www.codeplex.com/unconference

 

Resources

• Local DE’s are very important
• MVPs and RDs in the area

 

Evals

• Can keep it simple, just have blank evals for the speakers to give out and collect for their own use and then have one for the overall event.
• Don’t get roped into having people spend time manually entering evals afterwards, removes all the fun of code camp!
• Some have tried online evals after the fact
• Some use a composite eval with say six sections + a section on the back for the overall conference and use it to give out swag at the end.
• These are a trade off between easy, response rate and tabulation overhead.